King

I am currently reading The Wastelands, the third in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series and, with certain caveats, I am finding it very enjoyable. The hopping between worlds and time periods is something I find very appealing, as is the mashing together of genres, and King is a terrific storyteller with an effortless talent for hooking the reader and keeping them hooked over even the longest of his books. As was the case with The Walking Dead, the characters are so well written and likeable that I could quite happily read about them taking a trip to the launderette or getting their cars serviced. What is less appealing is the ghoulish relish with which King lingers on gruesome details, occasionally sinking to schoolboy levels of disgusting-just-for-the-sake-of-it, and sometimes I wish an editor had taken some scissors to the more revolting passages. However, this is a Stephen King book, and I imagine that this carries certain privileges, not least of which is the right to write whatever he damn well wants to without any editor or publisher telling him what to do.
The other problem I have with these books is the flip side of what I find appealing about them; the mashing together of genres and disparate story elements - robots, mutants, dragons and wizards - occasionally cause the whole thing to feel a little overstuffed, as if the author just threw whatever he wanted to into the story without any particular rhyme or reason. The existence of seemingly contradictory elements in the same world is only vaguely explained with some waffle about the "beams" which support reality having been partially destroyed, causing time and distance to distort and the wall separating worlds having become "thinner" in places. Personally I think that if King had excised the magical elements and set the story in a post-apocalyptic version of our world (which he seems to be hinting that his books' setting is in the earlier instalments) it would have been a much stronger series, and would certainly come across as less self-indulgent.

Razorback update

I want my story to be readable by people of all ages, but there is substance abuse in the text, which immediately makes it unsuitable for a younger audience. I've tried to think of some way of presenting drug use in the story without exactly presenting it as such, but so far am struggling to come up with anything ambiguous enough. In Star Trek there was an episode in which a character used an implant in his head to release endorphins into his brain, but I'm not sure that would work as a "drug replacement" in my story.
What happens in the story is that one of my characters, Amber, gets caught up with a rough crowd and takes substances that alter her physically and mentally, enabling her to communicate with non-corporeal beings (whom she believes are angels, although they turn out to be far from benevolent). This is a fairly important development as far as that character is concerned, and not one that I feel able to write out of the text at this stage. One solution that has occurred to me is that Amber has undergone a bonding ritual with one of her new friends which involves an exchange of blood, and that addition of alien blood to her body causes the physical and mental changes that she experiences.
This idea is not unrelated to a development in the character of Amber's friend, Glinzel, who I see as a sort of charming, hedonistic cult leader/rock star type, a sort of cross between Jimmy Swaggart, Edward Cullen and David Bowie. My physical description of the character portrays a tall, slender young man with long silver hair and intricate swirling patterns drawn onto his chest and back. It has occurred to me that Glinzel is not exactly an alien, but a hybrid of human and angel - a Nephilim - whose ancestors escaped from Earth centuries ago and set up their own civilisation on a distant planet. This would explain why Amber's exposure to Glinzel's blood has the effect that it has.

Why not try...?

I have been using Poser and other 3d programs to make pictures on which to base illustrations for my Razorback story. Poser 10 includes an improved "sketch style" renderer which results in some of these reference pictures looking good enough to use as they are, to the extent where I wonder why I'm basing drawings on them.
Of course, this is what happened last time. When I first bought Poser (it was on version 5 at the time) I was fully intending to base drawn illustrations on the rendered pictures, but one look at the renders convinced me to try and do all the pictures digitally. Once that decision had been made, however, I ran into all sorts of problems. Mainly, the very simple images worked fine, but the more ambitious, complex ones slowed my computer down to a crawl, leading to hours of frustration. The "toon shading" feature in Poser was horribly inconsistent, the program occasionally malfunctioned, losing the pictures I'd been working on, and the models that I was using were mostly other people's, and were very recognisable as such. In the end the digital image route led to a dead end.

Writing

I hate the story I'm writing. I write and re-write, and run the thing through an online grammar checker and collate it into one document and then re-read it and realise how much is still wrong with it and break it down into chunks and re-write it again, and it never EVER reaches a finished stage. It's not that I can't write, and it's not that I can't write funny things, but producing something that says everything I want it to say and makes the reader laugh and moves the story along is really difficult.

Perhaps part of the problem is that I don't know what kind of book this is. At different moments I feel like I'm writing: a L'Engle-esque sci-fi book for kids; a Douglas Adams-style comedy; and a C S Lewis cosmic allegory.

Another issue is that my writing style is quite terse, and unless I make a conscious effort, my sentences come out far too short. When I try to pad them out a bit, I start repeating information and waffling.

Freebies

I'm feeling annoyed with myself. Just before Christmas someone asked me to do a couple of drawings of family members for them from photos that they supplied. They didn't mention a price for the pictures, and neither did I enquire, imagining that the subject of cost would "just come up". I did the drawings, ordered prints of them, and presented them to the recipient. The pictures were accepted and that was the end of the matter, with no offer of payment for the work I'd put into the things, and barely a thank you.

It brought to mind a conversation I had with a professional illustrator/designer a while back. He told me I had to decide what my work was worth and set a cost. At this stage I know that my pictures are not worth nothing, but I know also that there are people out there who are prepared to let me put my time and work into a project and take the output for free. I should have charged a fee upfront for the work, and will know to do so next time.

There was a reason why I stopped doing pictures as little gifts for people years ago. Generally I found the recipients quite unappreciative - not always the case, but most of the time the reward wasn't worth the effort. I also felt that giving away what I did for nothing was devaluing it rather than being generous.

U2 gave away their last album for free. Rather than feeling impressed with this gesture (free album!) I found myself questioning the quality of the album. Would these guys be giving away their product if it was any good?

Developments

I have put the coloured pencils away for the time being and embraced traditional drawing with good old grey lead pencils. So far the results have been encouraging. I previously ditched lead pencils because they didn't "grip" the paper enough, but I've recently bought a pad of paper from WH Smiths that has enough of a grain to provide the friction that I need to produce controlled lines. There are few things worse when trying to draw a picture than having one's control reduced by excessively smooth paper or excessively slippy pencils.

My evening yesterday was spent downloading models from the DAZ website. They were all models - characters, clothes, props, scenery - that I'd purchased or got free from DAZ previously but which I still have active download links for on their site. My plan is to make an ordered directory of models on my computer in order to have easily-accessible models to use as reference for pictures. I have more or less given up on using Poser to create 3d art and have fully embraced using the program as an artists' reference tool (the purpose for which Poser was originally created and for which I originally bought it before getting sidelined into producing digitally-rendered art). I've done a few pictures of characters from my Razorback story using modified Poser models, and am very happy with the resulting images, with the exception of the sole human character, who I can't draw for toffee, for some reason.

I also spent some time last night looking into an issue with one of my 3d characters. There's been quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with this one. A while back I sent a model of a monkey to my friend and expert rigger in the States. He produced a rig for the character, but then asked me to re-do the UV mapping for the model as the original texture map was fragmented and very un-user-friendly. This I duly did, only to get a message back saying that the material groups on the figure all now had their names prefixed with "monkey_", which caused him major difficulties in the rigging process.
I managed to find a way to change the material group names in Hexagon, but doing so appears to have completely wiped the texture mapping from the renamed material, which takes me back to square 1.

Writing quote

Someone (and for the life of me, I can’t remember who!) once said that whatever story you’re working on should be written as if it’s the only one you’ll ever tell—pouring all your thoughts, feelings, ideas, ideals, passions, philosophies, hopes and dreams...every iota of Who You Are...into it.  That’s what I did with Moonshadow.
J. M. DeMatteis